Genetic engineering enabled psychic abilities in the test children. And the ability to control the machinery to open portals between parallel Earths. But prejudice turned into exile, and the escape of the most powerfully "magical."

YA by ZOEY IVERS

A world without sleep, and a lot of unexpected consequences--the Barton Street Gym and Chicago.

Demi God A YA fantasy. When even the Gods are corrupt, how can a bunch of kids save a young prince?

Not in the meaning of morally right or wrong, but more like that characters do not act as expected.

First issue: Migration to empty worlds.As the story stands so far, the refugees fled onto ten new empty worlds and not anywhere else, right. This appears a little bit odd to me, because:

-Embassy is practically empty and is in need of support staff for the infrastructure.-Embassy has some infrastructure-Embassy is extremely well connected (second only to Nowheristan)

-Cometfall's Asia is practically empty

-Warmonger Earth is permanently in search for cheap labor (Okay the refugees would be second class aliens).

-even a mediocre Student from MIT, Caltech or anything else, would be hot stuff on the medieval worlds. (Okay a Haward Law student maybe not so much ;-)

On the other hand, there are groups of people you can't easily send onto an empty world, because they need some infrastructure (Old, very young, handicapped, hospitalized, etc.)

So it seems very odd to me that there were no refugees send to or hired on the other established worlds, not even temporarily.(I see also many spoiled story opportunities, but this doesn't belong here.)______________________________________________________________________________Second issue:Israel. I know this is a ideological minefield.I highly doubt that whole nation would migrate, maybe whole ethnic groups, but never the whole nation.The Israel of today consists of many different groups, but I will pick out two main groups: Jew(Israeli) and Arab(Palestinian).Now I'm guessing (correct me if I am completely wrong) that if the Jews would leave, many Palestinians would be happy to have their land back and stay, right? And since many Palestinians have an Israeli passport, the idea that the whole nation would migrate is improbable.I know, the reality is much more complicated, and being forty five years in the future on a parallel dimension earth could change the situation dramatically. But it still seems unlikely.

P.S.I know your book is a work of fiction and it is your story and your artistic freedom. It's just that, in my humble opinion, the delineated story doesn't feel right.

Those are all good points, and I'll address them in the manuscript. The short version is that you can't dump billions of people onto a civilized world without totally overwhelming its services.

You certainly can't get it underway in a few weeks. Or days.

I'll toss those considerations in, and mention that every gate is going to a different area--on the same world for nations, different worlds for different nations. Where they can try to live off the land while getting farms underway. Q and Xen, and the rest of the magical community don't truly realize that the population of high tech worlds simply _cannot_ cope the way they could.

I'll mention the further connections of those worlds to Embassy and aid flowing. And the continuing refugee disasters on multiple worlds.

You are absolutely right, you could never dump billions of people on a civilized world. That would lead to chaos and war. But that wasn't what I suggested.I meant to send something between several thousand and a few million per civilized world. I know, you can't rescue everyone with this method, but you can blunt the edge by a several millions. Especially for those who would have no chance on an empty world.

Just for reference, there are about 1.4 million refugees from Syria in Turkey now (to my knowledge), and Turkey is just a medium sized country.

Just imagine telling an illegal Mexican kitchen help:"Okay 1st You and your family can die here."Or 2nd you can settle on an empty world and start from zero."Or 3rd you can work in the Embassy restaurant and hotel."Pay won't be great, but you will get full civil rights, a first class healthcare plus optional rejuvenation and lifetime extension."Your choice"

I don't dare to guess how many would choose option three, no matter how uncanny the some of the people are.

P.S.That's what I meant with further opportunities for short stories.Just imagine a snobby three Michelin star cook butting his head with 'cooking-competition' witches.

I haven't pinned down the time frame on the story, but it's short. Six months maximum, and probably less.

You'd be lucky to negotiate a refugee agreement with another polity in less than that, and how many worlds is Disco in touch with? 100? If they all agreed to take 120 million refugees (each) on short notice . . . as in "We'll start sending them this afternoon, sorry about the rush but the Bad Guys think everyone's going to die next week . . . "

Shifting them later to other worlds, yes, spreading the joy juice far and wide, yes. Sending food, helping with shelters . . . But there just isn't time to do diplomacy, there was barely time to shove a well-to-do nation with lots of private cars through gates. They couldn't wait.

And even in the nations that believed and evacuated, some stubborn people would have stayed home.

But that's only the first problem. The main death toll was a result of so many nations refusing to believe their world was not going to survive. I simply could not realistically see how it would happen. The Syrian refugees are fleeing a war they see up close and personal. How do you convince the Chinese leadership to evacuate their entire nation, when everything is normal, except those crazy Americans running around screaming about alien invasions. Are the Germans fleeing from ISIS?

Lots of people died. This was not a happy ending. This was "we saved as many as we could." Probably somewhere around 10%.

I agree with all of your points. I will not argue any of your absolute numbers. We had the discussion about motivating other nations and I yield to your decision.My sole point was, that it makes no sense to evacuate ALL of them exclusively to new, empty worlds.

Some calculations:According to the numbers 10% of 322 million (US census 2015) would be around 32 million.

If you would spread around two million of them on the main (well established) worlds (Embassy, Comet Fall, Arrival, Empire of the One, Warmonger Earth, Purple, Bogota Nuke Earth, British Empire) each of them is burdened with 'just' 250.000 people (that's less than the annual illegal immigrants into the USA alone (around 350.000) and we are talking about whole worlds!!!)

And by spreading an another million on around 50 larger colony worlds, you're blunting the edge of the absolute number by around 10%. (I'm not calculating with small colony world here like rift-world or ring world with 4 digit populations, more with such ones which could handle 20.000 refugees)

So you have to send only 29 millions in to wilderness (which hopefully are the better prepared).

As I said, I never suggested that you could rescue everyone nor I wanted to fiddle with your absolute numbers.My whole point was the missing spreading of the refugees.

The population of that world was 12 _billion_ people. Managing to evacuate 1.2 billion was still a major feat.

No doubt they took through truckloads of food, tankers full of gasoline and diesel. The west coast had enough time to ship through generators, refinery equipment, heavy machinery. The Army no doubt had mobile hospitals. I just didn't cover that part. Something like this could be a whole series, by itself. I'm going with shallow and quick.

And if any of you have gotten the itch to write a story branching off from this one, go for it. Fanfic is a good way to develop writing skills, or file the serial numbers off and make it your own universe.

"China. Less than eight hundred people. Soldiers and a few scientists."(I count that as zero millions)

At least India was happy to have the land, and people packed up and moved. But there was no general evacuation. Several million out of almost a billion saved.(50-100 millions?)

The Middle East? Again, they sent armies. At least a few civilians did follow. (maybe 1 million or less)And one small nation evac’ed nearly everyone. Man, woman, and child. Israel. (That would be around 11-12 millions, 9 millions now, extrapolated to 2050 would be 12.5, nearly everyone means ~90% = 11.3)Africa, hit and miss.(10-20%? I doubt that given the infrastructure. Anyway that's 250-500 millions) South America? Repressive governments, wanting to keep control.(more or less 0%)I can only guess North America and Europe.North America was on the front so a quite high number. (80-90% would be 350-390 millions)Europe? Maybe 50:50 (50% would be 370 millions)

An immense challenge. I doubt that it would be anywhere near possible.But hey, we are talking science fiction here. ;-)

But anyway it would be a great opportunity for the established world to grab talents. No great immigration agreements in use,but more bribing officials to look the other way when companies bring "back" personal that was somehow nowhere listed.

Like Arrival Steam Works hiring the workers (and their families) of a nearly bankrupt machine shop company in bulk.

Just a couple of thoughts about cannibal world. First, to me, it feels different from most of your wine of the gods stories. Part of that is the cosmic level disaster. It makes it feel kind of space opera-ish. You have had the comet fall, but most of the stories are people oriented, not really about cosmic disasters and that sort of things.

Second, and I kind of like this, Xen and Q do their best and get run over! Especially Xen tends to ramble through, almost Marty Stu style. But this time, things run right over them.

Third, perhaps for the future… Assuming Xen can find the right folks to negotiate with, the cannibal world people seem to be using this as a way to extend their lives. And Xen and the witches can offer that! Maybe if the cannibals steer away from the one world, we'll supply extended life? (Or, of course, you can use the full scale in between bomb). Heck, make it something where Earth, The One world, and the Fallen all get to cooperate -- Earth twisting, the one pushing, and the fallen powering the superconducting rings to levels never before done, perhaps with the cannibal folks playing games with their magnetics, too? Just thinking about how this might play out, but that's really your game to play.